9 September
Phase 1: c. 1977-2003
The Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP) began during the 1970s. It was founded as a special project of the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, to document and promote Iowa’s labor and working-class history through the collection, preservation, and publication of oral history interviews with Iowa workers.
The two people most directly responsible for the project’s founding and subsequent growth were James J. Wengert and Mark Smith. At the time, Wengert was secretary-treasurer of the Iowa Federation of Labor, and Smith was a labor educator with the University of Iowa’s Center for Labor and Management (today, the UI Labor Center). Stories about the project’s founding abound, but several of them revolve around Wengert’s conviction that the history of Iowa’s labor movement was slowly slipping away with the death of every longtime movement veteran. Decades later, Smith would write of the early days of ILHOP:
[Wengert’s] contribution was the vision that said first that it ought to be done, that union members . . . made important contributions and that the contributions ought to be recorded. . . . I had the good fortune to be involved in the project nearly from its inception, and take some credit for its success. I remember though, being frustrated and wanting to let it die many times. [Wengert’s] vision was so strong that, almost by osmosis, [he] imbued me with that vision, and kept me pushing it forward.
While Wengert was the project’s visionary, Smith played a critical role in guiding the project’s development. Although the directorship of the project had shifted to the UI Labor Center by the early 1980s, Smith continued to play a very active role in its administration, including reviewing interviews, supervising project staff, coordinating access, and shaping the project’s overall agenda.
Other important people in the project’s early years were Iowa Federation of Labor president Hugh D. Clark; UI labor educators Ed Czarnecki, Lynn Feekin, and Roberta Till-Retz, State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) director Peter Harsted, and SHSI special collections coordinator Mary Bennett. They anchored a broader advisory committee that included college and university faculty and administrators (notably Ellis Hawley of the UI History Department, Alvin Sunseri of the University of Northern Iowa, Richard Kottman of Iowa State University, Gene Paul and Fred Adams of Drake University, Ralph Scharnau of the University of Dubuque, and Joe Borgen and Richard Byerly of Des Moines Area Community College), a representative from Iowa’s Department of Public Instruction (now the Iowa Department of Education), and, most important, representatives from the broader Iowa labor movement. Among the labor leaders who shaped the early project were Carl Dahl of United Auto Workers Local 838, Frank Mandicino of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 69, Marian Moffitt of Communications Workers Local 7102, and Harry Wilford of Teamsters Local 238.
The ILHOP advisory committee found models and inspiration in the boom of oral history projects being conducted during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These projects included the United Steel Workers of America Oral History Project, the Communications Workers of America-University of Iowa Oral History Project (accessible at the University of Iowa Special Collections and the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives), and a series of projects being managed out of SHSI. According to Mary Bennett, who would steward the ILHOP collection at the society over the next forty years, SHSI’s commitment to oral history was a key factor in the advisory committee’s decision to establish it as the project’s original repository.
During these early years, ILHOP was funded through a monthly one-cent contribution from all members of Iowa’s AFL-CIO affiliated unions, as well as periodic contributions from the United Auto Workers and Teamsters. With this money, ILHOP hired a series of professional oral history interviewers (originally called “field representatives”) and a transcriptionist, Mona Lepic.
ILHOP’s first interviewer was Paul Kelso, a professional folksinger who had studied folklore at the University of Iowa under Harry Oster and worked as a graduate assistant at the UI Labor Center. Kelso (1977-79) was followed in the position by Greg Zieren (1979-81) and Merle Davis (1981-90). These three men—and Davis in particular—were responsible for most of the interviews conducted during Phase 1. St. Ambrose history professor Wayne DeJohn conducted one interview, with garment worker Elsie Nelson, in September 1977.
Over time, as funding became less stable, the project turned increasingly to a more diverse crew of part-time interviewers and people who came to the position in retirement. They included a professor at Drake University (Fred Adams, 1993-94), an oral historian who had previously worked on a similar project in Indiana (Janet Weaver Clements, 1995-96, who later served as curator for the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa), a UI law student and labor educator (Dan Holub, 1991, who would go on to work as a staff person with several unions), a former packinghouse worker and Waterloo labor leader (Gene Redmon, 1996-2000), and a labor educator and her husband (Roberta Till-Retz and Jae Retz, 2003).
During Phase 1, ILHOP interviewers conducted approximately 1,200 interviews with workers from roughly seventy-five occupational groups, including barbers, machinists, rubber workers, railroad workers, building trades workers, and people employed in farm equipment manufacturing. Approximately two hundred interviews were conducted with packinghouse workers, making that group arguably the largest single occupation represented in Phase 1.
At the same time, ILHOP interviewers and SHSI staff applied a community centered model rather than an occupation-centered model to interview collection and organization. Especially during the 1970s and 1980s, interviewers moved from community to community, often staying in local motels for weeks at a time. After being introduced to local labor leaders (often by Wengert or Smith), interviewers conducted a round of interviews and then followed those interviews with later rounds based upon a growing list of contacts. Once back at SHSI, staff organized interviews by these interviewing centers.
The project’s first community of focus was Dubuque, a small industrial city on the Mississippi River. From there, they moved on to communities of various sizes all across the state, including Albia, Burlington, Cedar Rapids, Charles City, Cherokee, Council Bluffs, Des Moines, Dubuque, Estherville, Fairfield, Fort Dodge, Iowa City, Keokuk, Mason City, Muscatine, Mystic, Newton, Ottumwa, the Quad Cities, Sioux City, Storm Lake, and Waterloo.
Interviewers initially focused on locating and recording interviews with the oldest interviewees, which led them to people who had been born as far back as the late 1870s. On the whole, however, the project focused on the period between roughly the 1920s and the early 1960s, with a particular emphasis on early organizing among coal miners and building trades and railroad workers; the rise of industrial unionism, especially in meatpacking and farm equipment manufacturing; skill and workplace culture; the impact of the Cold War on the Iowa labor movement; labor and civil rights; labor’s growing political influence during the 1950s and 1960s; and labor’s role in supporting community and public services.
As ILHOP staff traveled around the state, they also began to acquire related archival and manuscript materials. Over time, these materials became the Iowa Labor Collection, comprising more than 800 linear feet of photographs, local and state union records, personal papers, audio/visual materials (beyond ILHOP), and a wide range of pamphlets and associated union publications.
From the beginning, the project’s founders and early advisory committee hoped to use ILHOP as the basis for published educational materials, specifically “labor history units that could be integrated into American history classes in secondary schools” and “a popular book on Iowa labor history.” During the mid to late 1980s, the project developed and piloted a seventy page packet of curriculum materials related to labor history, and, in 1993, UI historian (and ILHOP advisory committee member) Shelton Stromquist published Solidarity and Survival, an oral history of the Iowa labor movement drawn from ILHOP interview transcripts. The Iowa Federation of Labor bought a copy of the book for every local union in the state, and workers later shared stories of copies being passed around workplaces and on shop floors. By the 1990s, the UI Labor Center also began using ILHOP interviews in its labor education materials, which reached thousands of workers in Iowa and across the US.
In 1999, with the support of Iowa senator Tom Harkin, SHSI received a $300,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to process and catalogue ILHOP interviews, including producing a print index to the project’s transcripts. In 2003, SHSI published the Iowa Labor History Oral Project Index, compiled by Janet Weaver, Spencer Howard, and Mary Bennett.
Phase 2 (c. 2011-present)
ILHOP’s second phase began in approximately 2011, when UI Labor Center director Jennifer Sherer began conducting interviews to document Roquette America’s year-long lockout of members of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) Local 48G in Keokuk, Iowa. In 2013, she secured support and funding to hire another dedicated interviewer, John McKerley, and led the revival of the project’s advisory committee.
This leadership set new priorities for the project, including documenting the period since the late 1960s, expanding the diversity of interviewees, reintroducing Iowa workers and the general public to the project, and adapting ILHOP for the digital era.
Now housed within the UI Labor Center, ILHOP has launched a series of new projects and initiatives, including expanded institutional collaborations, innovative methods of discovery and access, targeted rounds of interview collection, and dynamic exhibits and storytelling projects.
New Partnerships and Technology: Early in Phase 2, ILHOP expanded its partnership to include the University of Iowa Libraries, which together with the State Historical Society, won a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize analog audio and transcripts collected during Phase 1. This grant project, spearheaded by UI digital processing coordinator Bethany Davis and digital projects librarian Justin Baumgartner, made it possible for the UI Libraries to make ILHOP accessible through the Iowa Digital Library, while the physical collection remained accessible through SHSI’s research center in Iowa City. Between 2018 and 2021, ILHOP expanded on this work through a $195,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that funded transcription of previously untranscribed audio recordings, digitization, revision, and expansion of the 2003 ILHOP transcript index, and the development of this website.
New Voices: Collection of oral history interviews with recent immigrant and refugee workers has been a particular focus of Phase 2. In 2015, McKerley led a team that collected twenty interviews with recent immigrant and refugee packinghouse workers with the support from an Archie Green fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. These interviews now form part of the AFC’s Occupational Folklife Project. A similar project drew on support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to record interviews with the founding members of the Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa (CWJ) and creation of a community archive documenting the process and impact of CWJ’s founding by local immigrant community leaders. These interviews include the first to be conducted in languages other than English.
New Reach: Phase 2 has also seen the expansion of new ways of connecting with broader audiences. In 2017, ILHOP staff curated Speaking of Work, an exhibit based on ILHOP interviews that toured Iowa as part of the University of Iowa’s Mobile Museum. The exhibit traveled to thirty-two counties, engaging over thirty-five thousand visitors at fifty-four events, including the Iowa State Fair. In 2020, ILHOP staff launched the Speaking of Work audio documentary podcast in collaboration with another new partner, the Iowa Labor History Society. The podcast’s first season, Citizen Worker, draws on a new series of interviews conducted with public-sector workers, state legislators, and state labor relations staff to document the history of Iowa’s Public Employment Relations Act of 1974.
Now, at almost fifty, ILHOP looks forward to continuing its mission of preserving and promoting the history of Iowa workers well into the future.
Photo caption: Miners in mine with boy working. c. 1912. Source: John Jacobs Collection, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. For stories from an Iowa coalminer, see the interview with Harry Booth.
Photo caption: Rubber worker at Firestone in Des Moines, Iowa, c. 1960. Source: State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. For stories from Firestone in the decades after World War II, see the interview with Irene Tantillo.
Photo caption: Workers at Rath Packing Company in Waterloo, Iowa, c.1977. Source: State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. For stories from Rath during this period, see the interview with Lucille Bremer.
Photo caption: [Workers at] Maytag Washing Machine Company. Pouring a one-piece aluminum washer. c. 1920s-1950s. [Newton, Iowa] Photograph by Theodor Horydczak. Source: Library of Congress. For stories from Maytag, see the interview with Edris “Soapy” Owens.
Photo caption: Labor Day, Keokuk, Iowa. c. September 2019. Photo courtesy of John McKerley. For stories from the 2010-2011 Roquette lockout, see the interview with Drake and Ashley Custer.
Photo caption: Fire and rescue workers rally for public safety funding in Ottumwa, Iowa, c. 2017. Photo courtesy of John McKerley. For stories from an Ottumwa fire fighter, see the interview with George Krafka.
Photo caption: Carpenter Dale McCormick, Coralville Iowa. May 16, 2015. Photo by John McKerley. Source: State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. As a student at the University of Iowa, McCormick participated in the antiwar, women’s, and gay and lesbian rights movements before becoming a member of Carpenter’s Local 1260 in Iowa City, and the first woman to graduate from the Carpenters’ joint apprenticeship program in the US. The Dale McCormick papers are available at the Iowa Women’s Archive.
Photo caption: Members of the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers [Grinnell, Iowa]. Photo by Mark Lanning. Source: State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City.